Set 14, 2015

The issue begins with a body in the Gotham Marshes. “The body lies less than one foot from the city limit. A boy, not even six years old.” Batman’s shadow comes and scares the crows away. “He will punish the one who did it, and stop it from happening again.” A silent vow that would result in a city-wide search and put into motion a more interior, epiphanic form of Year Two.

Seems I’m more of a Scott Snyder fan when it comes to his light touches. I’ve followed such immense mythos updates as his Court of Owls, but when he pulls off something like Batman #44, I can’t help but pay attention. While issues like these can be taken as fillers—as one-shots that barely connect with the arc and serve various functions, perhaps to buy time until the artist catches up or until the series could synchronize with continuity parallels (like Detective Comics and Batman/Superman, in this case)—for me, it’s as if those long arcs of Eternal and Endgame had been committed to satiate fanchild appetites and indulge expectations just so ground gets cleared for something like #44 to sigh.

“And the story begins with coils. Coils upon coils.”

“A Simple Case” is Snyder’s story, but he shares writing credit with Brian Azzarello. Maybe the stuff I like belongs to Azzarello. I’ve read enough of his work to believe that the chain of events (Penguin, gangs, the father on the sickbed, the boy, and Penguin again, and the gangs again, the policeman) and the alternate chain (no spoiler here) both belong to him, such that the story “ends with more coils, circling the boy.” But who deserves the pat for the lost sneaker? Or for this touch: “There was a game Bruce used to play as a boy. He’d heard anecdotes about how the Miagani Indians put their fingers to the ground to ‘listen’ for coming changes in the land.”

My initial take on Jock’s work is that it’s too stylized for the issue. Too Vertigo, too Legends of the Dark Knight. Almost Jae Lee. I would have wanted something more basic, something clean. Then again, I’m not sure my idea would work with Lee Loughridge’s palette, particularly that effect where the sunlit panel clusters give the flashback while the grayish ones frame the present. The whole thing might come off as glare rather than nuance.

Possible also that it’s precisely gritty art like this that would work quite well with the cuts of newspaper text, the swathes of white representing snatches of Wayne’s early research. This technique begins with the sophomoric “mental note” at the bottom third page, but culminates in the essential city-text two-page sprawl towards the end of the comic. It’s the usual cowled figure surveying his city from a high, unshared perch, but it’s also Batman reading his own insufficient reading of Gotham.

The comic seems to tie in with the Superheavy arc as an issue-long flashback (a flashback within a flashback, but again: no spoilers). However, I’m more interested in thematic connections: Gordon is seen collaborating with the protagonist, entering with a quip on the bat equipment, a part of which currently installs him as the city’s legit-type Bat-hero. Wayne is depicted as a bleeding heart philanthropist, which is both a way to frame Batman as a project and a means for critiquing its internal paradox, its distant sort of involvement. The current “tabula rasa” Bruce Wayne has already been featured in previous issues as moving in a nonviolent direction, the way his parents worked with the grassroots when they were alive.

Most of all, what attracts me to this issue is how it’s a catalog of failures, one consistent with Snyder’s idea of Batman as a self-aware tragedy. “A Simple Case” is not where Batman starts and nowhere near where he ends, but it might as well be the point where Bruce begins to understand what Alfred (butler, erstwhile theatre actor) had intuited the day Bruce slipped on the purple gloves: his boy Batman, should he succeed, would become a high figure for both hope and inadequacy.

Set 12, 2015

We hold these truths to be self-evident:
That ostracism, both political and moral, has
Its place in the twentieth-century scheme of things;
That urban chaos is the problem we have been seeing into and seeing into,
For the factory, deadpanned by its very existence into a
Descending code of values, has moved right across the road from total financial upheaval
And caught regression head-on. The descending scale does not imply
A corresponding deterioration of moral values, punctuated
By acts of corporate vandalism every five years,
Like a bunch of violets pinned to a dress, that knows and ignores its own standing.
There is every reason to rejoice with those self-styled prophets of commercial disaster, those harbingers of gloom,
Over the imminent lateness of the denouement that, advancing slowly, never arrives,
At the same time keeping the door open to a tongue-in-cheek attitude on the part of the perpetrators,
The men who sit down to their vast desks on Monday to begin planning the week’s notations, jotting memoranda that take
Invisible form in the air, like flocks of sparrows
Above the city pavements, turning and wheeling aimlessly
But on the average directed by discernible motives.

To sum up: We are fond of plotting itineraries
And our pyramiding memories, alert as dandelion fuzz, dart from one pretext to the next
Seeking in occasions new sources of memories, for memory is profit
Until the day it spreads out in all its accumulation, delta-like, on the plain
For that day no good can come of remembering, and the anomalies cancel each other out.
But until then foreshortened memories will keep us going, alive, one to the other.
There was never any excuse for this and perhaps there need be none,
For kicking out into the morning, on the wide bed,
Waking far apart on the bed, the two of them:
Husband and wife
Man and wife

Another "angle" we might wish to look at (which might need the connections you brought) is the presence of painterly terms and techniques. "Decoy" could be Chirico's dummy, or any such model we use for painting and is usually unseen in the final product. It might also be fowl decoy for hunting season (there's enough bird presence to hint at that maybe? delta-like accumulation, flocks of sparrows?).

Also borrowing from fine art: foreshortening. Which is among the illusions necessary to achieve a 3D effect on a 2D plane. Connecting it with "memory" makes memory merely an attempt at truth, a (more or less) willful perversion of actual values to achieve verisimilitude.

In sum: much meta to be had.

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Before "Husband and wife / Man and wife" I'd like to comment on how this begins writ large (Declaration, nation, etc) in the first stanza and ends with that focus on a couple (or a couple of couples, or a couple of ways to couple a couple). If it's "pyramiding" inversely, then it's perhaps how citizens escape civil involvement by going into (exclusionary?) relationships.

Or perhaps, this was the way it's fashioned (the "motives" being so "discernible"), each couple a result of ostracism. (You are already of this democracy, so why don't you just go home and enjoy it with your husband yes?)

Pyramiding it upwards, we might recognize the couple as the start of the family which is the unit of aggrupations moving upwards to the first line where it becomes a component of the state. That customary "Man and wife" has always bothered me, and I'm glad this poem brought it up. Just playing around with it surfaces so much thought on socially supported gender roles in marriage: "Husband and wife," "Man and woman," "Man and wife," "Husband and woman."

Which is the decoy? Man or woman? Their married alter egos (husband / wife)? And (as you've pointed out) what's the decoy for? What's it defending against? (Or, what's being hunted?)

As usual, a rich Ashbery sample, one able to hold so many readings. I can imagine a reading of "Decoy" framed by a question such as: Is the marriage a foundation of the state or a defense against it? Which might also be re-framed according to your question: Is the marriage a foundation of the state (ie, the first two) or a defense against it (ie, the last two)?

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I think we're more used to the idea that a state harnesses us as individuals to make it run. That's the default setting, well at least for me, and of course before this poem where it seems we should look into how power takes relationships, rewrites these social scripts in favor of keeping the status (or, if we go by the line on "memoranda," perhaps it enlists us to properly rewrite these ourselves as "the common good," in the service of "invisible" elite interests).

You're right that we ought to look who the original declaration ostracized, what it kept in to make the nation work but did not arm with the full complement of political power otherwise enjoyed by the peers, the white menfolk enjoying equality (and the idea of equality) on the leather cushions of their boy's club.

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And below, something from the internet to punctuate that!
(Though that hidden line seems to ostracize everyone anyway)

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Maybe the poem also somehow explores a possible declaration of independence from the marriage construct, or at least the aspect of it that is "seen into" by the state (statistics office, joint taxes, licenses, certificates), just one thing among the bureaucratic process envisioned here as a flight of documents. It's also guarantee of state power: each marriage a reduction of possible individual threats to a household adhering to state-sanctioned values (a pledge toward civic duty, keeping the peace, socio-economic mobility).

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Pound's next line—CONTRA NATURAM—seems also a point both poems share. Things are not as they should be, love reduced to a socio-economic contract, people kept in offices, the violence bottled in these "moral" compartments spilling out into the streets. Which in turn gives the state more reason to exist, to keep the peace, maintain order, so forth.

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"Decoy" might also be commenting on the notion of a poem as something representational. How a representation does not necessarily share the same function as the thing on which it was modeled.

Take the "perpetrators" and their notations. It looks like they're city planners or the staff of politicians or bussinessfolk. But the memoranda that "take" (the line cut as it is on "take" sounds like insidious somethings have so easily been jotted down against the interests of others) will go on to take "Invisible form in the air, like flocks of sparrows"—a curious turn toward the type of language we're used to seeing in traditional poetry. Are these "perpetrators" also poets? Or are poets, working as they do over documents (of a different sort, given) "decoys" for the "perpetrators," looking enough like the ducks to be hunted, courting their eyes, going for the kill in circles, in what seems to be wholesome somersaults in language but in truth aimless "turning" (the etymology of verse)" directed by discernible motives"?

An aside: That whole last part of the first stanza reminds me of Stevens in his office, plying his trade and lunching on poetry on the same "vast" desk.

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I think a purely A=B approach would limit our reading of a poem like this, but yes, this is that time when flags are being burned, the US national anthem re-strung, everything's being made less sacrosanct. Down with pedestals! Free love!

The Chirico sample also makes explicit the operations of art, makes visible hidden/perspectival lines and the artist's model. This makes for all sorts of thinking, about how something that betrays the hidden mechanisms (of politics, of art, of poetry) can be made poetry. Even if perhaps it's painful, as maybe the exposed mechanisms will reveal (for example) that the poet has all along been complicit in the maintenance of the power structure s/he had wanted to see brought down or—at the very least—interrogated.

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What a find! Takes me to a different view of (but I think very much related to) "anomalies," "political and moral," as well as "urban chaos". And yes of course, the idea of sham marriages. I'm familiar with another type of sham marriage where outsiders marry US citizens for a green card. Sometimes it's deception, sometimes there's a pay-off involved, all sorts of schemes ("itineraries").

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That urban chaos is the problem we have been seeing into and seeing into,

Here's the usual state raison d'etre: keeping the peace. But they're not the only ones looking into the problem. The critics see urban chaos as a symptom of a greater, central problem (fundamental, even, since we're talking DOI) where methods of maintaining peace and order sometimes make the whole thing worse (abuse of power).

"Seeing into" is odd (but also refreshing). It's like a cross of "look into this" (study or investigate) or "see to this" ("man the deck," repair, take charge). Sounds mystical though, or psychic, and it's just like the Eye of Providence (which is also a pyramid!) at the back of the dollar.

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It could be a possible device to more closely resemble the DOI. If you see there the "Facts" about/against the history of the King of Great Britain, it's a list of statements that looks much like a poem. Capital letters, left-hand side. Also the DOI was replete with capitalized nouns like "Guards" and "Despotism" and "Happiness", so perhaps this simple step was a display of slight mimicry.

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Along with estrangement, I also read affluence and comfort in "wide bed". And "kicking out," how is that used? It seems to me a very eager up and at 'em sort of expression. But because of the context, I can't shake off the sense of violence.

(Answering your off point: I don't have this problem of access. Perhaps you could try other browsers whenever it gets tricky?)

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It's so curious how the rhetoric and images switch constantly from contraction to expansion.

To sum up: (contraction) We are fond of plotting itineraries (expansion)
And our pyramiding memories (contraction), alert as dandelion fuzz, dart from one pretext to the next
Seeking in occasions new sources of memories, (expansion) for memory is profit (contraction)
Until the day it spreads out (expansion) in all its accumulation (contraction), delta-like, on the plain (expansion)
For that day no good can come of remembering, and the anomalies cancel each other out. (contraction)
But until then foreshortened memories (contraction) will keep us going, alive, one to the other.

That last set of phrases seem expansive to me, but it makes sense also as a summation of the inhale-exhale that's happening here.

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It's increasingly sounding like an affirmation of our usual spotty memory as opposed to total recall. However, the problems suggested by the first stanza (and the last lines) seem to require more "remembering," more reflection and perhaps action based on such an "accumulation" of history.

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Maybe diminishment itself is hopeful. Let's return to Chirico, the artist of "The Double Dream of Spring". But first, a look at another painting of his, "The Disquieting Muses" below:

Kindly mind the lines on the path from the figures in the foreground to the edifices in the backdrop. Eleven lines, seven of which are in the light. In usual geometry (Euclidean), lines as these on the road ought to be parallel (like the sides of a bed). Ideally, two lines in parallel (as in our couple?) would run along forever side by side without ever meeting (far apart).

That's in geometry. However, if you apply that in composition, you would never have the depth that our visual sense affords us (seeing into and seeing into). So when an artist depicts a parallel, the lines move toward each other. Seen this way, a road (or a bed) would look more like a chopped off triangle (or pyramid, chopped off too, as in the dollar) than a rectangular block.

What's chopped off is the point where these parallel lines meet: the vanishing point. It's there in the pencils and you could trace it with a ruler (ex: the vanishing point in "The Disquieting Muses" sits somewhere above the first left-hand tower of that red-brown edifice). In this sense, it's more hopeful in the artist's composition rather than in actual geometry (at least they meet at some point, right?). It could perhaps be both optimistic and pessimistic at the same time, because the lines hold both possibilities: your eyes could move toward (see into) the vanishing point (receding into the common nothing) or down the base of the triangle, which means you're approaching yourself as a viewer.

Anyway, the trade-off if you choose composition over geometry is total recall. Geometry would show you everything, all the points in the lines, but none of them will meet. Composition gives you hope, yes, as it implies a meeting point. But it is only ever a hope, the meeting point undisclosed. And even if it were, that's the place you disappear into.

Or, the place where you "spring" from, depending on your perspective. Which is why I believe your point here is key.

Descending code of values, has moved right across the road from total financial upheavalAnd caught regression head-on. The descending scale does not imply

In "Decoy," this road (these parallel lines) seems to be a place of loss. Memory, livelihood, and values (and later on, relationships, perhaps society also by "extension").

In "The Double Dream of Spring" we have (at least!) two frames. Both are blue, but let's call one the inner frame (the smaller one, the one housing a sketch) and the other the outer frame (the bigger one, which includes the dummy, the clouds, and the inner frame). I was about to say that the outer frame includes everything, but that would be wrong. Half the white figure stands outside the frame, part of the dummy's head too. What's definitely outside both frames is the vanishing point of the brown "road". In fact, the point is doubly cut-off by the inner and outer frames.

I put "road" in quotes because it only seems a road in the right-hand side of the painting, relative to the building and the mountains and the "diminished" couple (or cacti shaped suspiciously like a couple of people in conversation). On the left hand side, it seems like the wings or legs of the easel, the beam of which cuts the composition in half and shoots upward through to the vanishing point.

"Decoy" seems to begin at the base (society/history) and is chopped off at a smaller unit (a couple/memory). It's incomplete, the future, a child, would have completed the triangle. We don't have the reason for so wide a bed, whatever the bureaucracy had been building up to. It's being avoided, like a central, defining topic that a couple (or state) can't speak of out of fear that everything would descend into chaos, unravel (dénouement, which also points to Freytag's pyramid).

Completion, however, would have also defeated the illusion. The whole poem might possible be a decoy for this unseen, this missing value.

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Hi, and thank you for asking. I went to a technical school and enjoyed the luxury of drafting lessons (learned more about parallel lines and vanishing points later on, when I tried to draw comic books). Also, I guess I've been lucky with art teachers in general. Never amounted to more than a hobbyist though, and so I must redirect you to Wikipedia—

(Which might mean half an hour more of time away from work! Sorry in advance!)

I would have missed these connections had I faced the bare poem, that is, without the benefit of your discursive frame of the collection and without a trace of your reading which finds the poem "ultimately hopeful" and "very positive". Admittedly your takeaway is contrary to mine (mine's pessimistic; odds had been stacked against the couple at the outset). But I wanted to see what you were seeing. This "double dream" of a poem somehow makes that exploration possible as everything now is clearly but a matter of perspective.

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I remember reading about that affair in a comic book...

...which sees to that as well as other great contradictions in the days and thoughts (and pursuits) of Jefferson.

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While the violets bunched then pinned to the dress appear to be a corsage. So the man/wife had been in the works the whole time.

Dear ghost, what shelter
in the noonday crowd? I'm going to write
an hour, then read
what someone else has written.
You've no mansion for this to happen in.
But your adventures are like safe houses,
your knowing where to stop an adventure
of another order, like seizing the weather.
We too are embroiled in this scene of happening,
and when we speak the same phrase together:
"We used to have one of those,"
it matters like a shot in the dark.
One of us stays behind.
One of us advances on the bridge
as on a carpet. Life—it's marvelous—
follows and falls behind.

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Could O'Hara be the ghost then? His confinement/haunt temporal (noonday, during lunchtime) rather than spatial (mansion)?

But your adventures are like safe houses,your knowing where to stop an adventureof another order, like seizing the weather.

The phrase "like safe houses" apply equally (though differently) to Ashbery's poems as well as to O'Hara's for me. The enjambed middle makes perfect sense, a demonstration of indeed stopping where it is most meaningful to stop. And there seems to be something in it about both writing and reading, living as well as relating.

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Ballet within its groove. It's why we keep coming back, I think.

Light Turnouts. Turnouts as results, outcomes possibly? (It's also lovely in that it still preserves the idea of the easier phrase.)

Perhaps a poem (or a poem written in a certain way) is a light turnout. Or more literally, that a ghost is a light turnout (only somesuch percentage remaining) compared to the life from where it was derived.

—One of us stays behind.One of us advances on the bridgeas on a carpet. Life—it's marvelous—follows and falls behind.

Maybe the conceit here's how lightly he can take a subject matter as loss without demeaning it or resorting to farce. The last lines have that guess-who? and I think Ashbery preserves this moment/puzzle for us, no pronoun confusions as in other poems.

Who stays behind? Living poet or the addressee ghost? And where is "behind"? There is only this liminal space, this bridge and only vague ideas of what sits on either end of it.

Initial reading: Life (the living poet) follows the ghost, keeps calling it, pitching poems at it, never (as yet) becoming it, always something else except dead. In that sense, he's the one on the bridge, loitering, just walking around.

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what someone else has written.

Most fitting! Much darker, and somehow the tone means everything. It's like JA absorbed a debate between Shakespeare and O'Hara, and had been of course, charmingly light-handed and biased:

To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,Creeps in this petty pace from day to day, (Dear ghost,)To the last syllable of recorded time; (the same phrase together:)And all our yesterdays have lighted fools (the noonday crowd?)The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle! (advances on the bridge / as on a carpet. / an hour,)Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player, (vs Life / marvelous / follows and falls behind.)That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, (vs knowing where to stop an adventure)And then is heard no more. It is a tale (vs adventures are like safe houses,)Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing. (vs it matters like a shot in the dark.)

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Brings to mind a holy sonnet from Donne:One short sleep past, we wake eternally And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.

Which seems a sort of answer to WS's 146. And is (possibly) fruitful to contemplate in the case of "Lights Turnout" in that the poet here, tarrying as he does on the bridge (as on a carpet), attended by a ghost (real or conjured), seems to me a picture of immortality-in-the-moment, of being in touch with past (life), present (poetry, "the scene of happening"), and future (death) all at once.

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Could very well be that. And if so, it's Ashbery's feat to somehow turn it all out lightly without shedding its gravitas, reassigning the roles maybe to nostalgia, longing.

it’s also pretty hard to remember life’s marvelous (Life—it's marvelous—)
but there it is guttering choking then soaring (an adventure)
in the mirrored room of this consciousness (like safe houses, / what shelter)
it’s practically a blaze of pure sensibility (like seizing the weather.)
and however exaggerated at least something’s going on (this scene of happening,)
and the quick oxygen in the air will not go neglected ("We used to have one of those,")
will not sulk or fall into blackness and peat (a shot in the dark. / follows and falls behind.)

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Agreeing that we play around with the idea of ghost a bit more. The JA spirit seems to allow that sort of thing. Dante has been mentioned above. Ginsberg summons Whitman. Macbeth was faced with the ghost of his old friend, Banquo.

The Greeks had a lot of ghostly activity, some heroes straight down Hades to converse or commune with ghosts (katabasis).Aeneas went to see his father; Orpheus to retrieve Eurydice. Odysseus also sought a ghost for advice, spilling blood at the mouth of a passage to attract Tiresias. This nekyia is closer (I think) to "Lights Turnout" in that there is a crowd (the crowd of other ghosts that Odysseus attracts, some of them he knew from Troy, but whom he did not address as he did Tiresias).

The conversation between Ashbery and his particular Tiresias sounds casual but also intimate. It seems a case can be made for this poem as a nekyia, perhaps the poem itself is making a case for poetry as a way of breaking bread with the dead, communing with the fact of dying.

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Take one down, pass it around
99 stanzas of beer

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Digression via Taraxippus (or, what happens when you stable ghosts)...

You're right, Waldman seems more ghostly than Frank here, less substantial, less alive. I like that Frank keeps singing (almost typed "keeps bursting into song" which was how it was in my head while reading this), and it sounds to me like a reversal of the Orpheus-Eurydice roles, the dead pushing the living back out into life.

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This is wonderful. Sounds like "Howl," and has that incantatory effect. My favorite lines were around 2 minutes in:

as they rise like buildings to the needs of temporary neighborspouring hunger through the heart to feed desire in intravenous ways

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I think enjambment should also be on the priority list when discussing sound, particularly because Ashbery might have been calling attention to it at the beginning of the second stanza. Here are the enjambed (or at least the awkwardly stopped) lines:

Dear ghost, what shelter in the noonday crowd? I'm going to writean hour, then readyour knowing where to stop an adventureOne of us advances on the bridgeas on a carpet. Life—it's marvelous—

There's something missing between the first and the second lines, could be "is there for you," "can we find," "should we consider establishing for business purposes," etc. But the elision is rhetorical so it sounds like a sentence though it's a fragment. The ghost is syntactical: the verb absented.

We could also look for "for" after "write" but this elision opens up the possibility that the hour is not merely the duration but also the topic (which could lead to this poem being itself that hour of writing / that hour written).

This hour stays with "read" on the same line, curiously enjambed, but leading to "what someone else had written." Could it be that whatever he writes is attributable to someone else, a loved one, literally, literally also a ghost writer (which could be weird if the ghost writer writes in behalf of someone writing to a ghost, which could be the ghost writer himself), or a literary influence, an imaginary friend or friend-like somebody (Lautreamont), a muse or djinn, a kindred spirit.

Stopping on "bridge" prevents passage, allows us to dwell there indeed "as on a carpet." And while stopping at "Life" would have been enjambment, putting in "—it's marvelous—" complicates it, makes an end-stop out of it (stopping it by judging it, by appreciating it) but the appositive is our way in prose to produce a sort of enjambment in usual speech, to disrupt the flow without cutting it.

Placing greater attention now to "—it's marvelous—" as it is the poet's addition, perhaps the product of his interaction with the ghost. Not only life, it's his annotation to life that matters (his use of life to justify one more hour of it).

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Loved your alepoem. And this stanza, where I kind of like "adventures" being its usual nounly self, but also somehow venturing into verb territory.

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Not exactly a ghost: phantom of the opera? These lines in particular bring him to mind:

You've no mansion for this to happen in. it matters like a shot in the dark.One of us stays behind.

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Barthelme says in an interview: "One of the beautiful things about words is that you can put words together which in isolation mean nothing, or mean only what the dictionary says they mean, and you put them together and you get extraordinary effects. Ashbery does this all the time."

We saw this while working on the title of the poem. And now you see this type of "extraordinary effect" on the idiom "a shot in the dark." Because it happens in the context of speaking with a ghost, of already having gone through the motions, the phrase gets charged with the terror you speak of. It doesn't lose the usual meaning which is an attempt to get something you have no prior information about. But now it's begun to sound like this something you have no prior information about is also out to get you.

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That is the reason we're having such fun. Rereading "Light Turnouts" now, Susan. And keeping your annotations handy while considering the possibility of "Dear Ghost" as Ashbery addressing his mother...

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Will have to read up on this Baudelaire-Lautreamont connection. And after that, walking over to Susan's Walser. Many fine hours of "what someone else has written" ahead of me.

It was always November there. The farms
Were a kind of precinct; a certain control
Had been exercised. The little birds
Used to collect along the fence.
It was the great “as though,” the how the day went,
The excursions of the police
As I pursued my bodily functions, wanting
Neither fire nor water,
Vibrating to the distant pinch
And turning out the way I am, turning out to greet you.

If line by line, can we do the title too? Lovely and surprising, "as though" glass was all around us and it's just a matter of time (or vibration!) before something breaks

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I learned that chateau's also a word for estates devoted to the production of wine. Hardware might be the usual tools or it might refer to arms. There's "precinct" and "police" which tends that way.

As if the multiplicity of the title wasn't enough, the place (places?) morphs anew: into a farm that is a precinct (a police precinct maybe). As a result, the other terms receive different iterations: "birds" are birds but also jailbirds. Could they also be girls? Could they be other things like informers (a bird told me...)? "Fence" could be the usual picket, or the enclosure around the precinct, or inside, where they keep recently caught offenders. It could be the rhetorical fence of fence-sitters, particularly when it comes to controversial issues.

Hi. Happy maybe, but why stop there when we could go full naughty? I say someone is drunk, pissing on a fence, unable (perhaps like other "birds") to exercise certain "control". When caught red-handed, he turns "the way" he is, his nakedness itself the greeting.

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Joy, also.

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Liking the fourth on your list. As well as the sixth.

Should think "hardware" along with all the farm implements? Or could there be another sense to these "farms" that I'm missing? Drugs, maybe, or slaves? Farms seem to me very open as landscapes go, but then it's all cut up and subdivided, very neatly too, else you'd risk disputes (remembering Frost's wall, and perhaps there's meta here too). Putting it as a precinct pushes the view a certain way, the borders making a stronger impression than whatever space or expanse you find (or imagine) here.

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Oh, Alan Turing.

It was the great “as though,” the how the day went, The excursions of the police

Sounds like an interrogation's happening here. "As though" is intriguing, was for me the greatest surprise in a poem full of twists and turns. It's a meta point, I think, "as though" might cut off the reader who's trying to make meanings from the poem because somehow the poem echoes the process, perhaps mocking (as though they were birds? as though they were police?) as it echoes.

More literally, "as though" could be a suspect making excuses. Or a suspect telling the truth, this truth rejected in favor of a more plausible or convenient scenario in the interrogator's mind (police? reader? or, gasp: police = reader?).

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It's a point of stasis. Or if it's movement, it's eternal recurrence. If November means the place in the calendar, then maybe something's always on the verge of ending.

Then, just when it's about to, it doesn't.

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I'm not familiar with this. Say more?

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Oh wow. That makes "turning out to greet you" as sinister as a kiss from Judas. This chateau-hardware store-farm-precinct might just turn out to be Gethsemane.

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I'm used to "as though" as an entry point to doubling. You state something then restate it "as though" something else. The great "as though" here ends in a comma, more of a general case than a specific one. The "how the day went" could be what that "as though" refers to, either the initial case (ex: love) or the metaphorical one (ex: rose), or because of the comma, we could be moving along the list, leaving the great "as though" as a thing in itself, something big enough to sustain itself and all the fragments and clauses to follow.

Poetry itself could be this great "as though," the place where (as in Borges's aleph) all places become each other: farm, precinct, chateau, hardware depot.

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My vote is the reader-writer relationship is that third thing, but I'm not closing doors to other possibilities (that would be very un-JA, I think)

Hope you'll add to this collection, and maybe re-read some WW lines along the way.

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Thanks very much. Read this before but had long forgotten about it, which is good because it seems so fresh now after rounds of ModPo. Entranced with "pig-headed father" for some reason, having in it the image of a son leaving farm roots to make a name for himself ("carving") in the city. That done, he's making "commerce"—something which promises reunion but maintains distance.

It is not you alone who know what it is to be evil;
I am he who knew what it was to be evil;
I too knitted the old knot of contrariety,
Blabb’d, blush’d, resented, lied, stole, grudg’d,
Had guile, anger, lust, hot wishes I dared not speak,
Was wayward, vain, greedy, shallow, sly, cowardly, malignant;
The wolf, the snake, the hog, not wanting in me,

Hi, and thanks for this question. I've done some reading (but it seems "some reading" won't ever be enough to cover even an aspect of a poet like Pound), and so far, I believe that the "condensed" parts of Pound's writing, his involvement with imagism (as opposed to later vorticism, his epic poetry, the Cantos) was influenced by Asian forms. For example, much has been said about the haiku-like quality (as well as wild innovation) of poems such as his "In a Station of the Metro". I haven't read him acknowledging ED.

For now, I'm following some dates. Imagism was being created at around 1911-1912. Pound would produce essays regarding its principles 1913. The anthology Des Imagistes (perhaps the more proper coming out of Imagism as a collective / collected effort) would see light as a standalone by 1914.

1955 would see Pound detained in a psychiatric hospital after charges of treason during the war, some 17 years remaining in his life. ED was available to him, but if he owed her anything he was not as loud about it as he was with the Whitman "parentage".

Will be scouring the annotations to the Pisan Cantos next week and will be sure to return here if I find any ED-EP connection.

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I don't feel the antagonism myself. But I think it's possible to encounter these two and see them warring inside you. I think it's in the way a reader or writer absorbs the two. You could devote yourself fully to one, perhaps becoming critical of other paths (ex: Whitman's too wild or Dickinson's too solipsistic, etc) or you could nurture both in your use of literature, which is in keeping also with some things we found in both (Whitman's open to contradicting himself, Dickinson's keen on swerving from the groove).

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Yes "apparition" is such a tricky part of this. I'm sure others would argue how essential it is to the lines, but it also pushed me to think about the imagist call for the "exact word" especially if the phenomenon is itself inexact, too fleeting that it seems an "exact word" would somehow violate it. The haiku seems to me not only a form but also a state of mind. Do you think Pound's lines amounted to a failed attempt at a (new?) haiku?

Agreed. It moves along with the moment, all that anxiety, perhaps alarm, maybe also a sense of promise, and she's shuffling with words, finding one that fits, one that will ultimately decide her next course of action: flee or fight or receive.

"I think there was a better poem to be written." You may be right. It seems to me that if EP was to make a choice between poem+prose and poem-as-is, he'd take the longer version. He'll discard imagism for vorticism, his hokku yileding to (or absorbed into) the Cantos.

Apparition becomes a sort of fleeting appearance if we remove the supernatural. Should we remove though?

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Joy. I'm taking that for you the poem was breathing fresh air into the transit scene?

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How two lines could overflow as sound, image, meaning.

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I'll direct you to a list like this if I see one. Or please, if you make one, tell me and I'll subscribe immediately. I'm afraid I'm only familiar with the Dickinsonians in the syllabus: Armantrout, Niedecker, Corman. I'm sure others will come up for me if I "read outwards" but it seems that when I'm dealing with Dickinson and her heirs, my tendency is to look deeply into their work rather than pick up on things and links that throw me off the groove (very un-ED of me, now that I think of it).

How very difficult it is for me (and it seems, for Ginsberg) to share this optimism. Still, how very infectious and "true" the way they sound it.

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Seems "father and son" had different Americas. I wonder about the relation though: could Ginsberg's America be the betrayal of its predecessor's hopes? or, could Whitman's America be the cause of the next America's despair? Did Ginsberg omit this discussion? Did he submerge it in the river Lethe?

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He's projecting his loneliness then, seeing a national malaise?

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Following you above, I think Ginsberg's conjuring WW as Dante did Virgil, making a guide out of his idol but at the same time making sure that the idol's less capable than he is (Virgil could not go beyond to Paradise because his limits lay in reason, neither baptized nor equipped to receive grace, whereas WW was out of touch, maybe out of kilter in a newer, less invigorated America).

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And how very different the ground of Ginsberg and that of Whitman. Ginsberg's shoes on a tiled floor, the produce and the cattle etc sorted or packed for easy, thoughtless consumption. Thanks.

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What do you think Ginsberg was trying to achieve by asking a forgetful (though not forgotten) graybeard?

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Not overboard, no! I think this is all about that brand of bizarre. That's as direct a link as a poet would claim of another. And it's in keeping with the conceit of "Song of Myself": what I assume, you shall assume. And here's Ginsberg assuming Whitman, soul and all.

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Would Whitman have loved such a boom as you described? I imagine Sandburg at home with with smoke and steel. But I wonder about Whitman, the limits of his inclusiveness, his idea of democracy.

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Ginsberg apparently carries a less affirmative view of the banks compared to Whitman. Where WW found life, industry, and democracy, Ginsberg saw death, alienation, and democracy. The death too of WW, therefore: as man and a savage set of poetics.

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"in the parking lot, waiting for you." That's a killer, and there were about two couplets there, one I loved:

Set 11, 2015

Adding only that syllable is shaped by man (perhaps man-shaped as well). Sound is yes, as you put it, rain, nature, everything else. Thanks! Good points also re: subversion in Dickinson's milieu.

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The syllable is the human translation of sound. In one sense it might lose much of what the sound is (as in anything that is translated) but it gains so much in terms of the work of ear and nerves, all that brain activity, and later mouth and tongue and lips.

That "if they do" is at once both authoritative and open. Something very much like ED's narrow hands, or the image of the tippler.

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An odd syllable if you just take it by itself. But it does the job. I think the physical values are important here, brain rather than mind, sky rather than heaven. I read this poem long before encountering "I dwell in Possibility" here, and it this Brain/Sky comparison was the first thing I thought of when I came upon the narrow hands/Paradise pair.

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Love the sound of "syllable" and how it stretches into three what signifies just one.

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Or if she was aware of the definition of sound by way of music. Following the Academus Rudiments Primer: Sound does not exist in the atmosphere, but only in our consciousness. When there is no hearer there is no sound, only waves.

I think it matters, esp if we take into account at the level of attention WCW gives his words. My own way is to take each instance of the poem separately, like the same play on different nights. So while we can string them into a narrative (on the first reading this was how it was, on the second) we can also read each by itself.

Reading it as one complete sentence (with the title in place) there are (at least) two possibilities if we include commas and a period:

1) Between walls, the back wings of the hospital where nothing will grow, lie cinders in which shine the broken pieces of a green bottle.

2) Between walls, the back wings of the hospital, where nothing will grow, lie cinders in which shine the broken pieces of a green bottle.

Maybe there are other possibilities (esp if we introduce other punctuations). From here we can discuss (a) why is there something missing (preposition or punctuation)? or (b) why is there that feeling of something missing?

Maybe other questions. Just goes to show that YES, it matters (at least for me) so thanks!

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If these words focus our vision, is the word walls still necessary? Aren't back wings sufficient? Maybe Williams dropped walls in to intensify the focus.

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Thanks for sharing. My sister also works in a hospital. Among her tasks: delivering babies. Perhaps the most fun a doctor's allowed to have inside those wings. Even then, I imagine the anxieties attending her weekly "chore".

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This said, I'd like to think the fact of brokenness luckily allows for (and lends special blessing to) the multiple ways of beginning the poem.

A letter which can wither, a learning which can suffer and an outrage which is simultaneous is principal.

Student, students are merciful and recognised they chew something.

Hate rests that is solid and sparse and all in a shape and largely very largely. Interleaved and successive and a sample of smell all this makes a certainty a shade.

Light curls very light curls have no more curliness than soup. This is not a subject.

Change a single stream of denting and change it hurriedly, what does it express, it expresses nausea. Like a very strange likeness and pink, like that and not more like that than the same resemblance and not more like that than no middle space in cutting.

An eye glass, what is an eye glass, it is water. A splendid specimen, what is it when it is little and tender so that there are parts. A centre can place and four are no more and two and two are not middle.

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Students figure in this discourse because they are... lambs? Sheep are saturated symbols (Bible, idiomatic expressions), and maybe the idea is to cut into it, find something new through the trademark multiperspectival Steinian take.

Light curls very light curls have no more curliness than soup. This is not a subject.

The line could refer to the coat of the living sheep, the smoke of the soup, perhaps the baby curls on very young, impressionable kids. I'm thinking of light too, in the curvature of time-space the subject matter of Einstein.

Or light, perhaps, meaning perspectival lines? Perhaps she is cuing us (again, anew) how best to read her work, another, more intricate way of putting slant-of-light or angle or (much more contemporary) spin.

The last sentence is nice, approachable and forbidding all at once. Does it mean that we should not take her words academically? That she has some aversion to that? Or could she mean that light is to be seen as (or also as) adjective.

Or is "This" itself not a subject, esp a this that is itself, not taken to refer to anything except its placement?

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"May" quite possibly, given what Peter says below about the "Mutton quad" (also Mutton = May + Button?). I've been looking at the letter M as well, how it places well with the line:A centre can place and four are no more and two and two are not middle.

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I wonder if M is (also) the letter that can wither, as W could be its image if it withers (and vice versa). Seeing letters reflected in water now (or dissolving to it, or become liquid Dali-style), thanks to you.

I think stanza 1 and the middle part of stanza 3 agrees with you. Stanza 5 very strongly:

Change a single stream of denting and change it hurriedly, what does it express, it expresses nausea (space, blankness?)... and not more like that than no middle space in cutting.

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Student, students are merciful and recognised they chew something.

For some reason I have in mind bored students who would rather be passive than participate. Their physical (maybe also mental) activity goes to the chewing of gum, how to do it without teacher noticing (or off to the principal's office with you! Gum is not the subject.)

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Pupils! Wow, of course! Here's some dilation for you...

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And this eye + your post brings to mind such readings as this that we're doing. It's like Stein's looking at how closely she's writing this, how closely we'll (have to) look. And she's telegraphing from her desk to ours: "here's looking at you, kids!"

Set 10, 2015

Claiming nothing, not claiming anything, not a claim in everything, collecting claiming, all this makes a harmony, it even makes a succession.

Sincerely gracious one morning, sincerely graciously trembling, sincere in gracious eloping, all this makes a furnace and a blanket. All this shows quantity.

Like an eye, not so much more, not any searching, no compliments.

Please be the beef, please beef, pleasure is not wailing. Please beef, please be carved clear, please be a case of consideration.

Search a neglect. A sale, any greatness is a stall and there is no memory, there is no clear collection.

A satin sight, what is a trick, no trick is mountainous and the color, all the rush is in the blood.

Bargaining for a little, bargain for a touch, a liberty, an estrangement, a characteristic turkey.

Please spice, please no name, place a whole weight, sink into a standard rising, raise a circle, choose a right around, make the resonance accounted and gather green any collar.

To bury a slender chicken, to raise an old feather, to surround a garland and to bake a pole splinter, to suggest a repose and to settle simply, to surrender one another, to succeed saving simpler, to satisfy a singularity and not to be blinder, to sugar nothing darker and to read redder, to have the color better, to sort out dinner, to remain together, to surprise no sinner, to curve nothing sweeter, to continue thinner, to increase in resting recreation to design string not dimmer.

Cloudiness what is cloudiness, is it a lining, is it a roll, is it melting.

The sooner there is jerking, the sooner freshness is tender, the sooner the round it is not round the sooner it is withdrawn in cutting, the sooner the measure means service, the sooner there is chinking, the sooner there is sadder than salad, the sooner there is none do her, the sooner there is no choice, the sooner there is a gloom freer, the same sooner and more sooner, this is no error in hurry and in pressure and in opposition to consideration.

A recital, what is a recital, it is an organ and use does not strengthen valor, it soothes medicine.

A transfer, a large transfer, a little transfer, some transfer, clouds and tracks do transfer, a transfer is not neglected.

Pride, when is there perfect pretence, there is no more than yesterday and ordinary.

A sentence of a vagueness that is violence is authority and a mission and stumbling and also certainly also a prison. Calmness, calm is beside the plate and in way in. There is no turn in terror. There is no volume in sound.

There is coagulation in cold and there is none in prudence. Something is preserved and the evening is long and the colder spring has sudden shadows in a sun. All the stain is tender and lilacs really lilacs are disturbed. Why is the perfect reestablishment practiced and prized, why is it composed. The result the pure result is juice and size and baking and exhibition and nonchalance and sacrifice and volume and a section in division and the surrounding recognition and horticulture and no murmur. This is a result. There is no superposition and circumstance, there is hardness and a reason and the rest and remainder. There is no delight and no mathematics.

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The sound of collard greens at 29, "gather green any collar": might this be gathering people of any stripe? Or, both the blue- and the white-collared workers. As if everyone is invited to the same table for the same meal.

Search a neglect. A sale, any greatness is a stall and there is no memory, there is no clear collection.

"Search a neglect" sounds like fault-finding, and that process spills over to the market place. Where one finds food, I suppose. And greatness... where one finds ideas? From the quotidian and the "neglected" details of everyday life, maybe.

"Collection" has been repeated, and here, working as it does with "memory" and "clear" seems to suggest the word "recollection". But this is the first instance, where memory is being made.

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Thanks for this link, and wow, congrats on that New Year's Day publication.

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"Claims" are also verbal, poetic acts. That sense could be at play here too, how this production of sound and play not merely a process of cooking but also consumption. Maybe in the sense that the performance at the dining table (conversation, eating) forecasts the events of the bed.

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Bargaining for a little, bargain for a touch, a liberty, an estrangement, a characteristic turkey.

The "characteristic turkey" (just the sound of that!) follows "an estrangement" which seem to me also a formal estrangement, the cadence and feel (and type) of the first four suddenly thrown off by her pièce de résistance.

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I don't think the reference to genitalia is at all out of place, and I'm glad you brought it up. And it's "characteristic": so maybe the male presence was perceived as an inevitable, tolerable intrusion or something of a threat in the space between Stein and her lover.

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So maybe it's beef vs turkey (at some point), about which of the plates will take the table, and that it could also be a question of identity if not politics (and maybe economics, as it "bargains for a touch").

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Looking also at a, b, c, d, definitions, as I feel that the words "sinking" and "rise" put so close to "standard" tends toward that image of a flag maybe in the context of a conquest, a contest, a demarcation of territory.

Please be the beef, please beef, pleasure is not wailing.

Hm. Hysterics does not a poem make? Is this a call for substance? But if we're looking at the processing of food, wailing would happen maybe as animal becomes beef. Or if the cook or butcher is injured in some way? Could it also occur while consuming, eating? Or afterwards?

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I only had a vague idea of what kosher is, much less how it's done. This connection is indeed fertile: the idea of "pleasing" the beef is there, of somehow easing the living animal into the state of death, preparing it (and ritual participants too, I think) for food and what it means, what it means to take something like this on the table, into the self.

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Cloudiness what is cloudiness, is it a lining, is it a roll, is it melting.

Stanza 31 plays with several things at once. There's the silver lining and the rolling of thunder among others. Melting... could that be rain? Such a painterly way of putting it.

It's all of a single line (lining?), perhaps a lesson on evocation, that you need only see (lining), hear (roll), and feel (melting) certain select details to account for the whole sky. It begins and returns to taste: the cloudiness of the gravy or soup maybe, the roll on the side, the butter.

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Lunch time here so I can imagine some sort of lining with pastries and cakes. Maybe the side dishes "line" the entree, or the dishes are lined-up, or it's yes silver, a literal lining along the edges of the plate.

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Dirty silverware? On to 33...

A recital, what is a recital, it is an organ and use does not strengthen valor, it soothes medicine.

I imagine someone playing music at meal time, Christmas or New Year. That curious ending sounds to me like "preaching to the choir," or how artists (or those with an artistic temperament or tendency) are the only ones to ever "get" other artists.

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I've been reading some Barthelme, and his view of Stein (alongside Joyce) sounded perfect: that she is party to making an object out of literature, that is not about something but a thing-in-itself "like a rock or a refrigerator." The recital and organ do not merely accompany each other, they are same, solid, able to produce music. And this music, her music, it does not serve catharsis is the old Greek sense, but by reviving the language itself, by soothing the "medicine."

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The word "increase" here and the context of your discussion makes me think that they're trying for a relationship were both individuals are freed rather than restricted, the "string" thus being redesigned for their intents. As for 34...

A transfer, a large transfer, a little transfer, some transfer, clouds and tracks do transfer, a transfer is not neglected.

In terms of food, clouds seem to me steam, also the dimming of the clear liquid as it becomes broth. Heat transfer has ever defined the process of cooking, a central consideration when living off the land. Tracks are more difficult in this level. But if I'm following the Karren's reading of the pioneer-in-Stein, then there's the possibility of seeing a dynamic process (collecting firewood, butchering, going to the market) making possible a couple of hours of cooking, standing in more or less the same spot and just cooking. All those errands are in that pot. And later, in the stomach.

Unburdening? An emotional, physical connection? These are here.

Conversation too. And the poem itself as a transfer, even the misreadings, all of that is communicated, assimilated (even if only a little), proven indelible.

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That would be a great connection to make, and I'd love to think that... whether it's there or not. I'm trying to remember Macbeth, him trying to squeeze some clarity from the witches. I'm seeing Stein's 'cloudiness' as important, vital, even if the brew (and the words) of the witches were necessarily 'cloudy'. Macbeth would project his longings into the words, seeing what he wanted to see and establishing a set of plans upon that vision. If Stein is making spells for us here, it seems the acceptable reader-position is that of the Thane of Glamis.

Set 9, 2015

Pardon my sarong. I’ll have a Shirley Temple.
Certainly, sir. Do you want a cherry with that?
I guess so. It’s part of it, isn’t it?
Strictly speaking, yes. Some of them likes it,
others not so much. Well, I’ll have a cherry.
I can be forgiven for not knowing it’s de rigueur.
In my commuter mug, please. Certainly.

He doesn’t even remember me.
It was a nice, beautiful day.
One of your favorite foxtrots was on,
neckties they used to wear.
You could rely on that.

My gosh, it’s already 7:30.
Are these our containers?
Pardon my past, because, you know,
it was like all one piece.
It can’t have escaped your escaped your attention
that I would argue.
How was it supposed to look?
Do I wake or sleep?

I know nothing of Shirley Temples other than what I'm reading here and in previous discussions of Hejinian's My Life. Her lines there were: "But nothing could interrupt those given days. I was sipping Shirley Temples wearing my Mary Janes." Back then, I thought it was a gendered drink. Now having second thoughts. Following this exchange, I'm taking that it marks sophistication? Coming of age?

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Thank you so much. Sipping it now the way you both say it. Makes me appreciate why this poem was chosen to close a book.

I wondered about the title because you wondered, and ended up with this. When I hit image search on my browser, the immediate thought was to compare this structure with Dickinson's House of Possibility. Then I thought of a breezeway's horizontal openness (as opposed to ED's which seems—at least in that poem—vertical) and got to thinking of Whitman's grass.

Lots of (breezy) thinking to be had. How this works as a metaphor for poetry (and for an Ashbery poem in particular, all the connections encouraged by it, as we his readers know firsthand) . And contemplating "breezeway" as a life endows us with both linear, chronological purposefulness (point A to point B to point D) but also openness (memory, digression, possibly escape).

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I like that—even as refuge—the breezeway is temporary. In a way it seems more sincere than a house, even if a house is the greater necessity.

It can’t have escaped your escaped your attention

In the sound file, I heard: "It can’t have escaped your escaped attention"—if it's all the same to you, I'd reference the way it's spoken. Your morbid comment (which seems to me supported by the final lines) has caused me to look up the possible containers in the poem.

The clothes are first up: "Pardon my sarong" and later on "neckties they used to wear." There's culture and time, perhaps gender too as a sarong seems to become something of a skirt when it crosses the pacific.

Are these our containers?Pardon my past, because, you know,

And time, as the neckties and the dance were chosen to indicate. But when the first line of the first stanza is echoed in the last, time becomes more explicit (culture too, I think, and the much-touted primitive color of the Orient, cf. Edward Said) and becomes "all one piece" (unity of West and East?) or, more accurately, a seeming or illusory seamlessness ("like all one piece").

The drinks have been covered quite fluently by you guys. This speaker's hyper-aware, perhaps insecure about how he seems, how it all looks, maybe about being "authentic" in terms of time and place when suddenly, out comes that commuter mug. So contemporary, on-the-go. Very much (and importantly) out-of-place.

It can’t have escaped your escaped attention

So all this "appearing" had to go somewhere, and that is toward "escaped attention," itself a mobile container. I wonder what's the tone here? I'm quite used to teachers bewailing the "short attention span". Poets, requiring as they often do some lingering on the page, would probably echo this lament. But there seems to be some acknowledgement of this here, an embrace of the fact. Not sure if I'd go so far as call it celebratory.

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I found that it's also "It can’t have escaped your escaped your attention" in this article by Epstein. If you covered "Pardon my sarong", Epstein looks into the title as well as the last line and trace these back to Herrick, Keats, and ("you guessed it!")... O'Hara! Read on—

“An interesting footnote: in Frank O’Hara’s 1953 play Try! Try!, O’Hara had one of the main characters, who is named John and who was played by John Ashbery when the play was first performed, say — you guessed it! — the phrase 'Do I wake or sleep?'”

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Pardon my past, because, you know,it was like all one piece.

"Also the unity of one's own life, perhaps." Yes. His singular word "past"—like your singular word "life"—makes it one piece. The frame keeps all these fragments together, somehow both a denial of the fragmentation and a distinct method of putting these tensions together in one place. What's to be said about a (white?) man in a sarong, wearing an old movie? About an old man drinking a child's drink?

And if we'd like to go meta now, this unity might be a truth based on (or forced by) effect or belief. The poem puts everything together, "You could rely on that." But does it diffuse the tensions by leveling them with each other, or does the poem cause greater unrest my putting these contraries so close to each other?

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I've been looking at this picture (without checking on its provenance), and was brought to reading the poem a certain (perhaps foolish) way.

He doesn’t even remember me.It was a nice, beautiful day.

If we assume a single "I" moving through the stanzas ("all one piece"), could we likewise assume a single other? I didn't do so on my first read. The waiter-server didn't translate to the "He" of the second stanza, though that "He" and the "You" of the second and third stanza seem related (but a case could be made that the you could be the reader or some other you, making for 4 initial distinct people: I, waiter, he, you).

This could be an exercise in futility ("because, you know," multitudes), but I tried bringing the waiter into the second stanza as either the I or the He. It's like, after the dialogue (taking the order, first stanza), one of the two shifted to interior monologue. They had a "past"!

There's this subtle game we play with strangers we meet more than once, always testing if we're remembered or not by the guard at the school gate or the boy at the cashier, or yes, the waiter... also, by our customer or client-in-passing.

So there, I've been trying to collapse the poem into a narrative of two people. It's fun because by the third stanza... they argue!

Why not collapse it to just one character? Would that be too much of—too sweet—a disorder?

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Not sure if you've linked this interview elsewhere, but I think it's a good thing to introduce this here because it begins by asking questions about the cover of Breezeway and the titles of some of the poems it contains. And because of other things. For example, you get to find shiny trinkets like these:

ASHBERY: I don't read my poems very much after I've written them besides at a reading. I put them away and then it's on to something else. I mean, I'd love to say yes, and that would be wonderful for this interview, but I'm just not good interview material. And yet, people always want to interview me. And, of course, the interview is a tragic fact of our time.

So, I think it's a keeper... and I'm not even halfway through.

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Same goes for the wabi-sabi tea bowl where "asperity" and "asymmetry" are among expected aspects. Yum yum to this grenadine mythology (thanks so much for bringing it up), and I'm all for a gender (gendered or gendering) reading.

I've been looking at "disorder" along these lines, as perhaps an internal imbalance (presupposing asymmetry). Maybe the interior is too rich, open, playful for the constraints of the exterior (age, gender, culture). Certain lines, I think, mark a possible (strong? tentative?) stance regarding this:Strictly speaking, yes. Some of them likes it,others not so much. Well, I’ll have a cherry.I can be forgiven for not knowing it’s de rigueur.Are these our containers?that I would argue.How was it supposed to look?

There's a concern about how things ought to be, these tacit, largely arbitrary but definitely compelling strictures. But questions are being asked. Arguments are about to be raised. Possibly, even the fact of having a stand is expected in language (and languages: "strictly speaking," "de rigeuer"), making this a special concern for poetry.

Set 8, 2015

Kind of empty in the way it sees everything, the earth gets to its feet and salutes the sky. More of a success at it this time than most others it is. The feeling that the sky might be in the back of someone’s mind. Then there is no telling how many there are. They grace everything—bush and tree—to take the roisterer’s mind off his caroling—so it’s like a smooth switch back. To what was aired in their previous conniption fit. There is so much to be seen everywhere that it’s like not getting used to it, only there is so much it never feels new, never any different. You are standing looking at that building and you cannot take it all in, certain details are already hazy and the mind boggles. What will it all be like in five years’ time when you try to remember? Will there have been boards in between the grass part and the edge of the street? As long as that couple is stopping to look in that window over there we cannot go. We feel like they have to tell us we can, but they never look our way and they are already gone, gone far into the future—the night of time. If we could look at a photograph of it and say there they are, they never really stopped but there they are. There is so much to be said, and on the surface of it very little gets said.

There ought to be room for more things, for a spreading out, like. Being immersed in the details of rock and field and slope—letting them come to you for once, and then meeting them halfway would be so much easier—if they took an ingenuous pride in being in one’s blood. Alas, we perceive them if at all as those things that were meant to be put aside—costumes of the supporting actors or voice trilling at the end of a narrow enclosed street. You can do nothing with them. Not even offer to pay.

It is possible that finally, like coming to the end of a long, barely perceptible rise, there is mutual cohesion and interaction. The whole scene is fixed in your mind, the music all present, as though you could see each note as well as hear it. I say this because there is an uneasiness in things just now. Waiting for something to be over before you are forced to notice it. The pollarded trees scarcely bucking the wind—and yet it’s keen, it makes you fall over. Clabbered sky. Seasons that pass with a rush. After all it’s their time too—nothing says they aren’t to make something of it. As for Jenny Wren, she cares, hopping about on her little twig like she was tryin’ to tell us somethin’, but that’s just it, she couldn’t even if she wanted to—dumb bird. But the others—and they in some way must know too—it would never occur to them to want to, even if they could take the first step of the terrible journey toward feeling somebody should act, that ends in utter confusion and hopelessness, east of the sun and west of the moon. So their comment is: “No comment.” Meanwhile the whole history of probabilities is coming to life, starting in the upper left-hand corner, like a sail.

Meanwhile the whole history of probabilities is coming to life, starting in the upper left-hand corner, like a sail.

Sounds like printed history, maybe one that begins with the letter A. Because A (and the number 4) would seem like a hieroglyph (or ideogram?) that both mimics and simplifies an image like the sail in order to involve it in language, rally it toward the encoding of history (which makes/defines history). We could be dealing with systems of meaning-making here, how perhaps the poetics in Ashbery's time differ from those of Ashbery in terms of language and logic though they seem to share the same form to every other printed text: one letter at a time, proceeding from the upper-left hand corner, on any given page.

(Or I could be stretching it as I often do with words. And would love to do sometime, with sails.)

His identity already doubled by addressing and answering himself seems to extend to the bookman and the little boy. His real situation ("how fare you") lost or merged or (to use Susan's inspired word) fully immersed in somebody's experience of fiction.

With lots of pictures, and good stories too,And Jack the Giant-killer's high renown.

Thank you so much for this co-poem.

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They grace everything—bush and tree—to take the roisterer’s mind off his caroling—so it’s like a smooth switch back. To what was aired in their previous conniption fit.

Christmas tree! There are (at least) two types of sounds here: the caroling and the tantrum. Carols are done for both celebration and a little profit. Patronage, done in the same spirit. Poets sometimes refer to their poems as songs, but to specifically call it caroling in relation to Clare (or with Clare in mind) seems to emphasize the poignant economic conditions that attended (perhaps guided, even drove) Clare's poetry.

It's compelling, particularly if the roisterer (Clare?) takes his mind off his caroling while in the act. It's dehumanizing, I think, as if a stage were set-up, a whole season, with the purpose of alienating a man from his voice. And it might be doubly alienating if Clare's poetry is seen as caroling, something done to make ends meet, parceling the soul in packages of sound and image.

Something was "aired" in the tantrum, perhaps this was Clare breaking out, so that against the normal-functioning poet (roisterer, caroler) the depressive is seen not as anomaly but in fact the truer aspect of this "sweet man".

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Cubism is my preferred entry point, maybe because it was exposure to Stein that informs my take on Ashbery. It's as if it's her "difference" in my lens that allows (or hinders) my view of Ashbery. Not entirely sure why this is the case, but the effect of it is that we see each sentence (or line, or phrase) as an aspect or facet instead of a narrative or logical development of the previous statements. Narrative and logical developments have been reduced to mere options (becoming richer too, in a paradoxical sense), but they're still there.

Kind of empty in the way it sees everything, the earth gets to its feet and salutes the sky.

Neither the dummy nor the white figure seems to be saluting. There's a giant inside the sketch that's at least looking up (the earth on its feet, as in Antaeus or Atlas?). Perhaps the easel, the frame (inside the frame) itself is doing the saluting,on its wooden feet, the painting (and the act of painting) both an extension of the earth and a manner of depicting it (as well as the sky). "Kind of empty" could refer to the dummy and figure's respective (non-)gazes, perhaps its a comment on surrealism itself (or to John Clare, as had been mentioned), or again literally, it's the inside frame (or dream) which is skeletal at best, a collection of perspective lines and squiggles that could either be seen as an unfinished aspect of a complete thing (which then characterizes the whole to which it belongs) or as a whole in-itself, an it-is-what-it-is; it's not a sketch of something that's about to be, it's no foretaste, it's done and in that way it could be a repudiation of the larger whole to which it belongs.

It'll be interesting to see something like this problem of placement play out in terms of the two major poets in this poem: sender and addressee, subject and object. Is Ashbery's poetry sitting beside Clare's, running after it, towering over it, or cooling in its shadow? Is he depicting it, appropriating it, or allowing himself to play some sort of belated part in it?

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Will there have been boards in between the grass part and the edge of the street?

For some reason, this line takes me back to an issue I once read Hass tackle (a few beats before the Bate biography came out) about Clare's lack of punctuation and how some editors choose to punctuate the poems while others let the poems stand the way these were set in Clare's hand, before these were sent to the printers (see correctors versus the leave-alones). According to Robert Hass: "there is evidence that [Clare] expected the help of his editors with regularizing punctuation and spelling."As long as that couple is stopping to look in that window over there we cannot go.

Will there have been boards in between the grass part and the edge of the street?

I attempted to read this by setting country images against those of the city. But aside from a building, and how this is a street instead of a road, there's too little of the city mouse to see. It's possible I can salvage this framework by not being so vulgar about it and look more closely at the nuanced differences in the way a John Clare contemplated the landscape and the manner in which a contemporary cosmopolitan would later regard a similar scene, but now with Clare and Clare-as-history figuring as inextricable components of it.

The way Ashbery shuffles his scenes and references makes me think that he's intending it for John Clare as offering, missive, criticism, see how far we've gotten because of you, and/or see how far apart we are. These, and perhaps more. Maybe it's a poetic annotation of John Clare's poems and positions, as had been suggested a few times above.

My usual take on Ashbery is akin to my view of Stein: a cubist at heart, taking in a lot of POVs and positions simultaneously, making possible the belief (if only for a moment) that all the positions have been considered, the best snaps presented in the most enticing possible way without reverting to the abandoned hut of the singular perspective.

I applied it to this poem, but it might have been the wrong thing to do. Let's consider the YOU statements and see what's in there.

1ST PARAGRAPH

You are standing looking at that building and you cannot take it all in, certain details are already hazy and the mind boggles. (Could be referring to Clare, could be talking to Clare, convincing him of his limits. Or my limits, a reader of his poem. Or the general "You", as in "One is standing looking at that building..." which could therefore be any possible person, including Ashbery. This is complicated by the possibility that Clare or his corpus is that building, giving rise to doublings, mirrorings, all the delicious permutations that might be, indeed, impossible to take in.)

What will it all be like in five years’ time when you try to remember? (He could be simultaneously talking to Clare, the reader, and himself. It's fascinating if he's sort of dear-ghosting Clare, telling him about his memory and mental state. Hmm. That would make Ashbery Clare's ghost of christmas future... and A Christmas Carol is another string from Dickens so...)

2ND PARAGRAPH

Being immersed in the details of rock and field and slope—letting them come to you for once, and then meeting them halfway would be so much easier—if they took an ingenuous pride in being in one’s blood. (If the appositive is to Clare, then it's as if he's telling him how to be better suited to poetry, perhaps to life. Clearly a criticism. But how can anything be clear in Ashbery? I'm also taking this as a guide of sort to reading Ashbery's poems, maybe also Clare's.)

You can do nothing with them. (Jumps at me as if the general any-person You, but if it's John Clare who can't even offer payment, hmm. If it's the reader, perhaps its the non-poetic type, one who could do nothing with all the details and actors and costumes that attend daily, seen always as backdrop... if seen at all.)

3RD PARAGRAPH

The whole scene is fixed in your mind, the music all present, as though you could see each note as well as hear it. (This contradicts the first You-sentence in the 1ST PARAGRAPH. But how did that come about?)

Waiting for something to be over before you are forced to notice it. (Quite possibly the reader or Ashbery before the poem was written, ie, before the poem forced him to "notice" John Clare. If John Clare's the YOU, then what's that something? Is this about the mental state again, leaving sanity behind? Is this about the belatedness of poetry, perhaps of all art, how hindsight throws all sorts of new light on the previous depictions?)

The pollarded trees scarcely bucking the wind—and yet it’s keen, it makes you fall over. (Yes, among many other things, it's an elegy. It brings John Clare's presence into the poem, has him wafting in and out of the "boards" between the words and scenes, makes him frame and figure and possibly co-reader and co-poet. If "pollarded trees" alludes to the subject matter and "scarcely bucking the wind" as well as "it's keen" brings to mind the effect of Clare's poetry, then who falls over in the last phrase? The reader? Or is it Clare... his vision clearly acute, but the cost of it more so?)

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I was thinking of the WE statements some time after I tried reading the YOU ones. You were looking at the THEY statements, and some of them overlap with these WEs. I'd like to read them as any or all of the following expressions of solidarity:

1 WE JOHNS: Clare and Ashbery 2 WE POETS: Something more inclusive, and could perhaps be closer to general metapoetic statements than if we look at it through the WE JOHN lens. Maybe these poets are the newer flock, as opposed to Clare and the earlier generations.3 WE HERE: Ashbery and the reader

As long as that couple is stopping to look in that window over there we cannot go.

"That couple" could be the THEY of the next statements. Whatever they are, they're keeping the WEs from the window. Or, from going anywhere, not necessarily to the window. It could be a case of looking at people who are looking at something, and maybe WE are enrapt, attending their attention.

These could be just the "usual" poetic voyeurism: poets looking at people, particularly at the way these people view their world. This has a self-reflexive aspect. The poet looking at people looking is paying attention to attention itself, his/her own looking included.

This becomes very fascinating for me if THEY are the older poets, their poetic vision an object of the poetic vision of WE newer poets. It's also a hindrance, in a way. An Ashbery cannot now look at a piece of the action without looking also at the way a Clare saw the same thing. And since that vision has informed his, maybe there's no way that the past might step away from any attempt to view the unforeseeable future.

Or maybe there is and Ashbery has figured it out. Maybe the keys are kept in the elusive way this poem is composed.

We feel like they have to tell us we can, but they never look our way and they are already gone, gone far into the future—the night of time.

Assuming THEY are our predecessors, then the usual idea is that they've gone on ahead of us, the voice we hear's but the echoes of their life's work. They never look our way because they can't (being ahead of us), but the way it's said here implies an option, that old poets could speak to his or her expected followers or future readers. Maybe a critique of Clare? Or really, just some wistfulness and pining on our part?

If we could look at a photograph of it and say there they are, they never really stopped but there they are.

This line (along with the previous one) has me thinking of the figures in the Chirico dream. They do not merely tower, but seem also in motion, but since POV's being abstracted, framed, they seem to be going nowhere. Stillness (and silence) is the generic property of paintings (to paraphrase Berger), but perspective, line, and sometimes swirls of color try to depict motion. So really, nobody was ever going anywhere. But when you abstract perspective, make sure it's seen as a device, then the figures seem (at least to me) not merely still but arrested.

Alas, we perceive them if at all as those things that were meant to be put aside—costumes of the supporting actors or voice trilling at the end of a narrow enclosed street.

Still assuming THEY as predecessors, seeing them as costumes seems an honest appraisal of our consideration. Whitman is ever only a part of a syllabus, and Clare is a book on the shelf. If we get Clare only through Ashbery, then Clare is further removed from us. Regarding the previous poets as "costumes" diffuses ownership. It's possible to take this as an image that degrades and/or democratizes.

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So much in your world to enjoy now! You-who. Very happy for you. We'll have little hands soon too, by December, if elements align and we carry to term. I think it's important how you spelled things out. I'd like to take on poverty. Along with the histories you pointed out, some of the lines seem to go there. It's a sound way to begin reading something like this: There ought to be room for more things, for a spreading out, like. Yes, it's metapoetic but it's also basically a question of property, of boundaries imposed. This might as well be an incomplete sentence upon which period is imposed, so much like a stone marker that tells you (perhaps unjustly) the limit of your land and labor.

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Thanks!

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I'm joining in on the thanks, if you don't mind. Thank you for always returning us to each other. Now look who's back as well.

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There ought to be room for more things, for a spreading out, like.

Glad to see you again. Will be reading these links in a while. For now, this Ashbery line you quoted (pleasantly) puzzles me. That "like" kind of multiplies the space by a factor of ten, maybe much more. It has this weird vibe for me, it opens it all up with that (may I call it) gesture, and somehow also, I can't get past it. Maybe it (the line, this poem, Clare's poetry) doesn't spread out in the usual sense of "expansion" but in the sense that it always recaptures, draws you back into its space.

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Yes, there's that! While I agree with the immersion in or deep cognizance of the present, I don't know if this is entirely ahistorical. I'd like to bring your two angles together. I propose that there's actually a saturation of temporal perspectives (too much time from so many angles, evident even in the usage of the word "like" as an ancient simile cue, a sign of preference, perhaps withheld affection, maybe a lost dialectal mannerism, and yes the colloquial use) that the effect is that time becomes mere surface (time references), one cannot rely upon it for perspective (no single perspective more privileged than the other). One might come at Clare from the future (recalling an ancestor) or the present (dialogue with a co-poet), or maybe even the past (coming upon him as if a ghost)!

All the ghosts at once, Ebenezer! So how will they help you shape your life? You can do nothing with them. Not even offer to pay. They're all speaking at once (all of them a Clare, all of them an Ashbery) So [in effect] their comment is: “No comment.”

All these amount to having a (relative) sense of origin ("starting in the upper left-hand corner") but no a clear sense of direction ("the whole history of probabilities is coming to life"). But the tone is light, disarmingly so. It feels liberating, as risky and wondrous as the open sea ("like a sail") particularly if viewed against Clare's rootedness to the land, his poetry and struggles square as they are on the ground.

There ought to be room for more things, for a spreading out, like. / like a sail.

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We've thrown in our impressions about it, our interpretations or attempts at interpretations, and now it looks as if we try and assemble a mini-collage (within a collage) based upon the word LIKE alone. I thought to dwell a bit longer on the six times the word was used in the poem. Here's the most unusual use of it:

(A) There ought to be room for more things, for a spreading out, like.

Of the five remaining instances, three used LIKE as one would AS IF:

(B) They grace everything—bush and tree—to take the roisterer’s mind off his caroling—so it’s like a smooth switch back.

(C) There is so much to be seen everywhere that it’s like not getting used to it, only there is so much it never feels new, never any different.

(D) As for Jenny Wren, she cares, hopping about on her little twig like she was tryin’ to tell us somethin’, but that’s just it, she couldn’t even if she wanted to—dumb bird.

All three has something to do with internal states. B seems the most certain about where the mind is (well, the speaker sounds certain, though we might not be quite so sure about what exactly is so smoothly switching to and from where). The second and third (C and D) seem to me not as sure: in the second case we're attempting to appraise the general reception while in the third we're guessing Jenny Wren's intentions. I think D is using LIKE as one would ALMOST AS IF. C might be doing so as well.

Meanwhile...

(E) What will it all be like in five years’ time when you try to remember?

Here LIKE seems but an extension of BE, as in "how will things be / what will things turn out to be in five year's time?" But I'm fond of LIKE here, because it cues internal states again: memory, perception.The way it's phrased, there's a hint of possible causation. The seeming of things (be like) might be dependent upon the attempt to recall. "It all" might turn out to be something else altogether (or might not be anything at all) if you don't try to remember.

And in the last instance, LIKE cuing a simple simile in a sentence which possibly channels the articulation of the memory:

(F) Meanwhile the whole history of probabilities is coming to life, starting in the upper left-hand corner, like a sail.

In these last two cases, past and future are (con?)fused together. In E, someone (in the present) is wondering how the future will be (five years time) when it becomes someone's past as this someone moves forward (a more distant future, a bit or much more than five years time).

F unsettles. History is a record of something that has already happened. It's just one thing. (e.g. Either Clare was committed to the asylum or he wasn't. Either the patrons committed him to posterity or they neglected to attempt it.) We look into the future and see probabilities all the time. A "history of probabilities" looks at the past not only as it is but also as people hoped it would turn out, as people feared it might go, including perhaps all those ghostly byways that were both unforeseen and unrealized.

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Yes! That turns it around a bit, history both as an articulation of probabilities and as something that could only be articulated by probabilities (weighed with and against each other)

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It happens all the time, nature abused to the point that the abuses return to us as afflictions. I had been looking at pruning here as a decorative operation, as something that might reflect on poetry or the criticism (or use) of poetry, particularly as it applies to how Clare's poetry has been managed (and mismanaged) by him and those who have inherited (or appropriated) his "estate".